1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems and methods for managing search results and hiring practices, particularly those involving digital content and/or references to physical objects or devices with a network identification or links, and more specifically, to proactively managing a bibliography (or profile or footprint) of such content or references as, for example without limitation, search results that may match, relate or refer to, or implicate the reputation, branding, or other user defined criteria relating to an individual or business entity over a large scale network environment.
2. Background
With the ever expanding universe of digital content on the World Wide Web (WWW, Internet, the network, or Web) coupled with generous freedom of expression principles, the occurrence and frequency of content and/or network identifiable physical objects referencing or pertaining to an individual, even private individuals, is becoming more wide-spread. Of course, the presence of such content is exponentially greater for public figures and businesses. Adding to this, more and more content is piled on the network each day due to the ease and speed of digital formatting and submission methods and the increasing access to the Web by more and more network connected physical objects, devices and users every day. Given the significant amount of time it takes to build up a positive reputation and that only moments may be needed to ruin it, tools for managing online reputation are becoming increasingly important for both individuals and businesses.
With the vast amount of digital content as well as network identifiable physical objects on the Web, the likelihood of encountering references associated with a particular name or brand that disparage and/or generate sufficient negative publicity such that the reputation of the individual or business entity associated with the name or brand is impacted in a negative manner is of real concern. These reputation harming references encompass a wide range of activities such as posting embarrassing confidential information or images to unfair commentary about a competitor's product to critical scathing reviews about an experience with a business service online. While this remains a concern where the attacks are warranted, an even bigger concern arises when such attacks are unwarranted, unauthorized, unsubstantiated, disparaging, false, libelous, taken out of context, or merely posted in jest or poor taste. The posting of remarks, images, video clips, sound bytes, and other media content bearing such reputation harming commentary about an individual or business entity may cause significant harm to the reputation of the individual or business entity or those employing or doing business with such individuals or business entities. Such negative publicity may be even more egregious given the anonymity of a Web that favors unregulated commentary and wherein website hosts controlling the postings commonly elect not to police the content submissions or are not required to, except in limited circumstances. Related to this, in many instances, there is no opportunity for the individual to respond or to present one's case in a more orderly and more truthful light. Thus, even when caught, many improper references to an individual or business go unchallenged and remain in the realm of the Web to appear on command every time a search is conducted. As is readily apparent, the difficulty of monitoring such references and lack of an adequate avenue for responding presents significant difficulties in managing and repairing one's reputation online or from adequately communicating that such negative information are not references at all (e.g, same name, but different person).
The failure to manage one's reputation, or search results or other digital content listings related thereto, may have serious consequences as more and more college recruiters, prospective employers, and other information prospecting entities looking for positive or negative (“red flag”) references conduct their own due diligence and/or hire a third party to search for content that would raise a red flag regarding an individual or business entity. Since such information prospectors do not have the time to thoroughly investigate or even peruse every remark to determine whether it applies to the individual or not, and thus inapplicable remarks may be considered. If the information is sufficiently negative, the applicant may not even have an opportunity to explain the situation as the hiring or recruiting party will quickly look elsewhere. On a related note, if the candidate cannot effectively communicate and provide an online reputation, the candidate by be deemed to risky to enroll or hire.
Related to this, the order in which the information is presented is often at the mercy of the search and presentation logic of a conventional search engine. While such search engines typically attempt to present information that is current and has a higher probability of matching the search terms, there is a distinct possibility that the recruiter or employer will only read a few links from the top of the list and stop there given time constraints. These links may be of little importance to the determination of the suitability of the applicant or may not be relevant at all if the links refer to a different person altogether.
As a related problem, much of the content referencing an individual or business entity is outdated yet remains accessible to search engines. This clutters up the network by taking up storage space, taking up unnecessary bandwidth during searches, and slowing down search engines that may have otherwise ignored the reference. The opportunity to locate and comment on these references and request their removal from a centralized platform is currently lacking.
Given the foregoing, and in light of the expanding presence of the court of public opinion into the online community, managing online content relating to or referring to an individual or business, or even ensuring unrelated content is marked accordingly, is becoming increasingly important. Early efforts such as posting responses to negative commentary, requesting removal of certain postings from a website host, and publishing more positive references to drive down negative listings in the search engines were decentralized and required the complainant to review an ever growing number of resources from multiple sites, a daunting task given the amount of content on the Web. Also, such approaches commonly did not address issues such as removing content from the web, particularly old out of date content as this is commonly left to the search engines to filter down based on lesser matching probabilities and older content currency on the results page listing. Furthermore, even for removed content, much of this content remains stored on cached pages, and, even if deleted from the source, remains accessible over the Web. In addition, such prior efforts did not satisfactorily address removing unauthorized, misleading, disparaging, or unrelated content.
More recent attempts have been directed at increasing some control of one's reputation by aggregating information about a specific person, usually through publicly available social network pages and email address matchings, and then further offering certain automations for presenting pages with similar matching names to an individual. However, the currency of the information gathered in these attempts at reputation management is not addressed and instead the content located is merely assumed to be sufficient to create a personal profile. Worse than that, such processes frequently include pages the person being published about has not authorized or approved. Thus, it lumps into a personal profile those pages that may have nothing to do with the individual.
While some of these earlier tools allow a user to address a few aspects of reputation management such as presenting a listing of sites, both related and unrelated to the user, they are typically cumbersome, decentralized, less than comprehensive, and offer very little functionality of that over a conventional search engine. More critically, none of these services enable a user or business entity to proactively manage a listing of content through a centralized system that combines identification, filtering, sorting, and commentary processes to enable an individual or business entity to publish to the world a listing of web resources approved, ordered, and commented upon by the person or business entity being mentioned on the resource.
Thus, there exists a need for a system and method that performs such processes in spite of the ever-expanding universe of content. Such a system would allow an individual or business entity to take control of an associated name and/or brand using a centralized system and then present to the public a viewable, approved, commented upon, and ordered set of content links pertaining to the individual or business entity or other user defined criteria. In addition to assisting in the management of one's own reputation in an online environment, such a system may also assist third party college recruiters, employers, and other information seekers looking for pertinent references before making a personal involvement, recruiting, hiring, or business decision and be used to facilitate the removal of out of date content as well.
Related to this, given the large volume of job applications typically submitted for any job posting, there is also a need to assist hiring parties, such as human resource (HR) managers, and other information and reputation profile seekers with a sorting and commenting system and related process that provides the profile seeker with processes for reducing the number of qualified applicants or prospects or interested parties to a manageable level by screening out unsuitable candidates such as those with negative reputations, having no or a limited profile, or not fitting some criteria, and for assessing the overall strength and compatibility of each candidate. Such a system and process may well also provide for communicating and clarifying background issues along with the ability to identify irrelevant references, particularly those available in an online environment, regarding each applicant. In addition to the foregoing, there is also a need for such a system and process to provide for the preservation of records and audit trails for compliance with applicable hiring practices and related laws.